Blogs

Harvard Business Review’s recent article, 40 Ideas to Shake Up Your Hiring Process, by Joseph Fuller, Nithya Vaduganathan, Allison Bailey, and Manjari Raman offers an excellent ‘self-check’ list of current innovative practices for hiring, although that wasn’t their intended approach.

Here’s a sample of how we might ask ourselves, “Have we:

• Re-written job descriptions for work that really needs to get done.
• Sought out candidates who match 70% to 80% of the most critical skills for the role — and then developed learning curricula to equip them with the remainder.
• Offered “micro-internships” (short-term paid projects) or apprenticeships to assess fit before committing to a full-time hire.
• Employed gender-neutral language in job descriptions to attract more diverse candidates.
• Expanded internal talent mobility (e.g., lateral job transfers, internal gig work) by drawing on a foundation of skills and aspirations and added development to support retention.
• Embraced on-demand and gig platforms to increase labor-force flexibility.
• Attracted alumni back to our organization.
• Tapped into “hidden” populations, including retired, neurodiverse, and previously incarcerated workers.
• Acquired companies with top talent — or entered into agreements to borrow and share talent with other companies.
• Partnered with educational and community institutions, including job centers and community colleges, to offer tailored curriculum and term-time work experiences to build a talent pipeline with relevant skills.
• Developed and marketed a more effective referral program, particularly for in-demand roles.
• Broken work into its components to assign responsibilities more clearly across a team or to freelance workers, and improve your approach to sourcing.
• Deployed talent more dynamically, by creating skills-based pools of talent that can be assigned to the most critical priorities on demand.
• Used creative scheduling and shift redesign to allow lower-wage workers to move or switch shifts more flexibly while still providing adequate coverage.
• Experimented with different flex models, including compressed work weeks, sharing jobs among multiple part-time employees, and/or scheduling split shifts to cover “rush hours.”
• Redesigned work by eliminating, re-assigning, or automating less-critical responsibilities.
• Embedded technology that improves ease of work, including language assistance and tools to accommodate older workers.”

Read more from the source: Harvard Business Review